In This Tourism Marketing Quick Tip:
Each negative review is an opportunity to win more customers. It all lies within your response–a strong response can win customers, but a defensive, emotional response can lose them.
Our checklist will help you form strong responses to negative reviews that will build your brand.
A Checklist For Responding to Negative Customer Reviews
- Cool down, but reply quickly
- Use varied words, rather than a copied/pasted response
- Have a senior staff member respond
- Greet by name, with a friendly, upbeat tone
- Reinforce your brand message
- Acknowledge feedback, and apologize when appropriate
- Share how you will resolve the problem
- Invite the reviewer back
- Move detailed follow-up offline
- Communicate & resolve issues with staff
An Example Negative Review and Response
Here’s an example of a response to a review in the 2-4 star range:
Review Example:
“The city tour was just alright. Our tour covered a lot of the popular city sights and history. It was extremely hard to hear the guide since there was a lot of noise in the downtown area at the time. A microphone would help the tour, especially when you have a good storytelling guide. The guide mentioned she had forgotten her microphone! I feel like I missed out on some of the interesting facts about your city.” – Jean
Here’s a strong response that has gone through the Blend checklist:
Response Example:
Jean, thanks for letting us be part of your travel plans, and we appreciate you taking the time to share your experience. We are sorry to hear that it wasn’t the ideal experience you had hoped for. Forgetting the microphone was a total miss on our part. At our guide meeting this morning, we discussed this, thanks to your comment. Every tour will always have a microphone and extra batteries stored in a common area to ensure a microphone is always with the guide. Despite this, we are glad to hear you enjoyed our guide’s stories. We hope you decide to book a tour with us again and consider the next one on us. Please contact me- Denise, General Manager, at 749-123-4876 to book the tour you were expecting.
So, don’t miss the opportunity to win customers with tactical, timely, calm, and respectful responses to negative reviews. Responding in this way is rare, and prioritizing this will put you ahead of the competition. If you want more in-depth examples and guidance, check out our blog post on How to Respond to Negative Reviews.
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